Posted by Bill Wilson on October 23, 19102 at 11:34:08:
In Reply to: T h e G R E A T M A N posted by P i c a z z 0 on October 23, 19102 at 04:00:39:
Picasso is a misunderstood and under-appreciated artist whose work is committed to values that also inform the work of Marcel Duchamp (with no issues of influence, which is a silly idea, although permissions are possible). Picasso, that gift to the world, was given as a birth-right his governing value of elasticity. Sophie Germaine had given elasticity a leg-up in mathematico-physics, as part of a study of material qualities that had begun, in the case of elasticity, only late in the 17th century. Before that, elasticity was not studied because it was not a real quality of the world, for only the timeless and immutable and imperishable was real, that is, could participate in a Divine Godhead that was eternal and immutable. Picasso was born with a criterion of existence, so that for him, to be is to be elastic. Listen to Philip Larkin:
And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
You command is as clear as a lading-list
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
To exist.
And what's the profit? Only that, in time
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.
For Picasso, bodying forth elasticity as his axiomatic choice of existence, nothing else must “be thought/ To exist.” He painfujlly and sadly overestimated the elasticity of friends, and of women, but surely flattered them by his assumption that everyone was as elastic as he was. Late in his experiences with Francoise Gilot, he held out and offered her sections of a tangerine, an apt image of the elastic & sectioned relations he wanted with her. I could write a book about the man who lived and painted to bring elastitity into point-blank, close-up sharp-focus as a moral value. Not that many teachers appear that we can afford to be flippant about their lessons. Whatever the relations between P.P. and M.D., and allowing that all materials are elastic to some degree, note that Duchamp cut up bathing caps to make a sculptural installation, he draped flexible coal-bags from a ceiling, he stretched string in the space of a gallery, aware that string resumes its shape because it is elastic; and he preserved semen as yet another way for an artist to make his mark on paper with a sufficiently elastic material. In coping with people in relations like husband to wife and artist to dealer (printer; collaborator), such potentially stiff and unyielding taxidermied relations under his elastic governance participated in the easy-going give-&-take, the frictionless to-&-fro, of their Duchampian elasticizations. The name, Sélavy, is the code-word for the elastic responses to events in which rigidity is possible. Puns are the elasticity of words. The name Rose elastically became Rrose, stretching around Eros. Both Picasso and Duchamp used as a touchstone of elasticity the elasticity of their penises. While Picasso and Cocteau showed theirs to each other, no comparable anecdote has surfaced about Duchamp. No loss. The standard anecdotes of the lives of artists—did they converse? What did they say about each other---are trivial unless the values within the event are defined and combined with the values manifest in the art. Picasso and Duchamp lived and worked seriously on behalf of moral and aesthetic values, here pointed toward with the moral and aesthetic concept of elasticity. A writer has said that I am mistaken, that Picasso was a practitioner of the plastic arts. That man is so peculiarly inelastic, staggering under his inflexible armor, that he becomes my evidence for the need to develop an appetite for elasticity, with Picasso’s the person who bodied it forth in life and in art. Duchamp had some other primal or axiomatic governing values, but none was inconsistent with Picassoesque elasticity.
nd to the Poster of this question: Make jokes, I'm elastic, I can take them seriously, and I appreciate your stretching of English into French, how elastic it is, but thank goodness as elastic it will resume its shape as though it had not been so stressed:
: iv azked thiz Queztion befor - Marcel had 'zome ' obzervationz RE: The greatman - Doz any of U heaDY zcolarz hava line into ZUCH ?